Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  •

  During lunch recess, Bridie skipped the cafeteria and walked over to the rectory, looking for Proudbird. Sister Hilma opened the door. She wouldn’t let Bridie past the foyer without knowing why she was there. Instead of a habit, Sister Hilma wore a blue-flowered homemade dress and a homemade apron. Her glasses had such thick lenses that Bridie couldn’t find the woman’s eyes to make eye contact.

  “I do have a genuine reason,” Bridie said. “He promised to tune my guitar.”

  “Which is where?” asked Sister Hilma.

  “Well, I forgot to bring it today. I meant, some other time he’d tune it for me. But I am doing this paper right now, and I have to get information about agricultural practices in Lagos,” Bridie said, lying.

  Sister Hilma rolled her eyes but gestured Bridie to the kitchen.

  Proudbird was broiling hamburgers. Bridie watched while he stacked a platter with the cooked burgers on buns and doused them with sweet-pickle relish and ketchup.

  Carrying the platter, he led Bridie up many stairs to a white-walled suite. Johnson was inside, lounging on the overpolished floor before a color Zenith. He was watching Victory Garden. “Hallo,” he said to Bridie.

  There were only a few pieces of furniture. There was a bed with boards instead of springs and a mattress. “You cannot be serious,” Bridie said as she sat down beside Proudbird on the boards.

  “Oh, all serious,” he said, handing out the burgers.

  He and Johnson talked back and forth in their complicated language.

  Proudbird said, “My brother tells you it’s what we like. The beds like this.”

  “So I guess I believe you,” Bridie said. She put her spine against the powdery wall, trying to get her bottom comfortable on the board seat. “No, I don’t. You’d have to be cracked to prefer this. It’s cement. It’s the same as choosing to sleep on the road.”

  Johnson looked back from the TV and smiled with Proudbird.

  Bridie took a little bite of her hamburger. “Food’s at least normal,” she said. “What other stuff do you like?”

  “Good arms. I like a girl with good arms,” Proudbird said. He held back a smile. The action made a parenthesis of dimples around his mouth.

  Bridie massaged her right elbow. She had removed her cardigan and tied it at her waist, and now she bunched it up behind her to form a pillow against the wall.

  “We’ve been joking you about,” Proudbird said.

  “This isn’t your bed, then? You sleep in a regular bed?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bridie asked, “Johnson, is it O.K. being in this country so far? What do you think?”

  “Oh, yeah, truly,” Proudbird said, answering for his brother. “There’s no place else.”

  “Pleased to hear it, I guess,” Bridie said. “Since it’s my country.”

  •

  Back at the high school building, Bridie went to the ground-floor washroom. There were a dozen or more girls lined up at the mirror, with more girls waiting in a second row. Bridie used a sink and punched up at the pink-soap dispenser. A couple of girls next to her were sharing the hot-air hand dryer. Another girl peered around at the back of her legs, looking to see if her patterned panty hose had a runner. While looking, she noticed her friend’s shoes. “Tell me, Jan, why do you wear clogs so much?” she said. “They’re heavy, they’re noisy, they’re nerdy.”

  “For the heels,” Jan said. “I’m all of five foot one, and we can’t wear—you know—heels.”

  “I want a sheegarette!” said a girl with hairpins clasped between her lips.

  Bridie finally got to use the hand dryer. Over the roar of its blower, she heard someone behind a stall door shouting, “Holland—and then London. No Paris. Only we’ll probably end up not going now. Say, you know what’s written in here? ‘Today is tops.’ Now, that person thinks small.”

  Reminded, several girls produced felt pens and began to write on the stall doors and the green wall tiles. At the mirror, girls took turns writing with a wand of mauve-colored lipstick.

  Bridie got out her own black marker from her purse. On the face of the hand dryer she wrote “608/256-4146,” the telephone number of Nukewatch, copying it from a page in her trig notebook. “Get this down, or memorize it,” she announced. “Especially if you’re going on a car trip, anyone. Call it if you catch any trucks carrying bombs. Three things to look for are the truck’ll be led by courier cars, and they’ll be unmarked, and all have lots of antennae. The giveaway is the truck’s license plate. If it begins with E, that’s Department of Energy, and you’ve got one. It’s carrying warheads. Call Nukewatch and say which direction the truck’s going, but don’t follow these guys. They don’t want to make friends.”

  “Litzinger!” said a voice. “You’re dead if you stole my chem homework.”

  “I borrowed it to copy. I told you. I’m giving it right back,” answered another voice.

  There was a huddle forming around a girl who was holding a small gold-plated drinking flask. “You each get one little sip and that’s all,” the girl said. “Pure Chivas Regal. I took it off my gramps. It was in a drawer in this little table, right next to his bed?”

  “O’Donnell, where’re you from?” a girl with seven or eight hair braids said to Bridie.

  “D.C., but I can take the subway, which really isn’t bad,” Bridie said. “My mom went here, so it’s—you know. It’s like I had to come.”

  The braided girl said, “If mine sent me this far, just to go to St. Ben’s, I’d be like ‘Get out of my face.’ Are you going with anybody?”

  “Uh, not really. No time. I sort of date this black guy who’s around.”

  “Your parents know? They let you?” asked the braided girl.

  “My parents wish I were black, actually,” Bridie said.

  •

  “Here, take these. They’re making me mean,” Bridie said. She gave her box of Junior Mints to Tasha, who sat just to her right. It was last period—American history, with Sister Elspeth.

  Bridie felt in her purse for her pack of sugarless gum and found instead a toy whirligig she saved for times when she baby-sat the kids of some of her parents’ clients. Her mother and father worked for a storefront firm that practiced poverty law. She found her chewing gum, sneaked a stick to Tasha, and popped a couple into her own mouth. She reached again into her purse and clenched the spring shaft of the toy. The wheel went around, harmless colored sparks flew there inside her purse, and there was a sharp whirring noise.

  “A siren? Say a Hail Mary,” Sister Elspeth said, glancing up from her lecture page. She went back to reading.

  Bridie chomped her gum to softness. She blew a spearmint bubble, breathed it in, and snapped it with her teeth. Immediately she said, “Pardon, Sister.”

  “You’re pardoned. Forgiveness is a duty, not an option, for Christians, by the way.”

  “Rules for everything,” Bridie said. “What say?” asked the nun.

  “Agreeing with you, Sister.”

  The nun returned to President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev.

  Bridie waved her hand, and Tasha gave a low groan.

  “What?” Sister Elspeth said.

  Bridie said, “The ‘We will bury you’ line. If you’d read Khrushchev’s memoirs, you’ll find out that was a faulty translation, not what he meant at all.”

  A boy named Chadwick raised his hand, and when Sister Elspeth nodded at him he said, “It’s in a Sting song, Sister. Sting has lyrics about it.”

  “I don’t care. It was a misinterpretation,” Bridie said. “Anyone who can read would know that.” She snapped her gum again, for emphasis. Some of her classmates tittered.

  Sister Elspeth said, “Bridie, I warned you. And the rest of you can stay after school and laugh along with Bridie for ten or fifteen minutes while she does stunts with her gum.”

  “Aw, don’t make them do that,” Bridie said.

  “Then stand in the corner, O’Donnell. I’m sick of dealin
g with you. While you’re over there, you can count the holes on the cinder block at eye level. The fifth down. Block E-five. I know how many holes it has, so don’t try to pull anything.”

  “Got it,” Bridie said. In the corner, she sneaked a look at her wristwatch. The class would go on for another eighteen minutes. There was no hurry yet about counting.

  “I’m opening a civics club,” Sister Elspeth was saying when Bridie next paid attention. “You’re my charter members.”

  “You’re kidding—a civics club?” Bridie said to the wall.

  “I didn’t see your paw in the air to be called on,” Sister Elspeth said.

  “I’m not being in a civics club,” Bridie said, turning around. “That’s for the little kids in Ding Dong School. You can erase my name—I resign.”

  “I don’t believe it—you’re still chewing gum! Take that out of your mouth and stick it to your chin,” Sister Elspeth said, getting out of her chair.

  There was some laughter, and Bridie grinned.

  Sister Elspeth came for the corner, and Bridie gulped and swallowed her gum. She started laughing.

  “Stop!” the nun said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Can’t,” Bridie said, from behind her open-mouthed smile. She stared up into the enormous face of Sister Elspeth.

  “You have to,” whispered the nun.

  “I can’t!” Bridie said, and her voice squeaked a little. Her laughter was high and unnatural. Her chest and shoulders shook.

  “Please,” the nun said. “None of this matters—don’t you see? You’re acting weird, Bridie. You’re scaring me. What’s the matter with you?”

  Bridie shrugged, still laughing.

  Sister Elspeth opened her arms and held them out for Bridie.

  Later, when Proudbird was driving her home, Bridie told him that if she could take back some things in her life, she thought that moment would probably be one—when she had suddenly stopped laughing and the look of horror she must have shown as the nun, in huge concern, reached forward to embrace her.

  12

  Pretty Ice

  I WAS UP THE WHOLE night before my fiancé was due to arrive from the East—drinking coffee, restless and pacing, my ears ringing. When the television signed off, I sat down with a packet of the month’s bills and figured amounts on a lined tally sheet in my checkbook. Under the spray of a high-intensity lamp, my left hand moved rapidly over the touch tablets of my calculator.

  Will, my fiancé, was coming from Boston on the six-fifty train—the dawn train, the only train that still stopped in the small Ohio city where I lived. At six-fifteen I was still at my accounts; I was getting some pleasure from transcribing the squarish green figures that appeared in the window of my calculator. “Schwab Dental Clinic,” I printed in a raveled backhand. “Thirty-eight and 50/100.”

  A car horn interrupted me. I looked over my desktop and out the living-room window of my rented house. The saplings in my little yard were encased in ice. There had been snow all week, and then an ice storm. In the glimmering driveway in front of my garage, my mother was peering out of her car. I got up and turned off my lamp and capped my ivory Mont Blanc pen. I found a coat in the semidark in the hall, and wound a knitted muffler at my throat. Crossing the living room, I looked away from the big pine mirror; I didn’t want to see how my face and hair looked after a night of accounting.

  My yard was a frozen pond, and I was careful on the walkway. My mother hit her horn again. Frozen slush came through the toe of one of my chukka boots, and I stopped on the path and frowned at her. I could see her breath rolling away in clouds from the cranked-down window of her Mazda. I have never owned a car or learned to drive, but I had a low opinion of my mother’s compact. My father and I used to enjoy big cars, with tops that came down. We were both tall and we wanted what he called “stretch room.” My father had been dead for fourteen years, but I resented my mother’s buying a car in which he would not have fitted.

  “Now what’s wrong? Are you coming?” my mother said.

  “Nothing’s wrong except that my shoes are opening around the soles,” I said. “I just paid a lot of money for them.”

  I got in on the passenger side. The car smelled of wet wool and Mother’s hair spray. Someone had done her hair with a minty-white rinse, and the hair was held in place by a zebra-striped headband.

  “I think you’re getting a flat,” I said. “That retread you bought for the left front is going.”

  She backed the car out of the drive, using the rearview mirror. “I finally got a boy I can trust, at the Exxon station,” she said. “He says that tire will last until hot weather.”

  •

  Out on the street, she accelerated too quickly and the rear of the car swung left. The tires whined for an instant on the old snow and then caught. We were knocked back in our seats a little, and an empty Kleenex box slipped off the dash and onto the floor carpet.

  “This is going to be something,” my mother said. “Will sure picked an awful day to come.”

  My mother had never met him. My courtship with Will had all happened in Boston. I was getting my doctorate there, in musicology. Will was involved with his research at Boston U., and with teaching botany to undergraduates.

  “You’re sure he’ll be at the station?” my mother said. “Can the trains go in this weather? I don’t see how they do.”

  “I talked to him on the phone yesterday. He’s coming.”

  “How did he sound?” my mother said.

  To my annoyance, she began to hum to herself.

  I said, “He’s had rotten news about his work. Terrible, in fact.”

  “Explain his work to me again,” she said.

  “He’s a plant taxonomist.”

  “Yes?” my mother said. “What does that mean?”

  “It means he doesn’t have a lot of money,” I said. “He studies grasses. He said on the phone he’s been turned down for a research grant that would have meant a great deal to us. Apparently the work he’s been doing for the past seven or so years is irrelevant or outmoded. I guess ‘superficial’ is what he told me.”

  “I won’t mention it to him, then,” my mother said.

  We came to the expressway. Mother steered the car through some small windblown snow dunes and down the entrance ramp. She followed two yellow salt trucks with winking blue beacons that were moving side by side down the center and right-hand lanes.

  “I think losing the grant means we should postpone the wedding,” I said. “I want Will to have his bearings before I step into his life for good.”

  “Don’t wait too much longer, though,” my mother said.

  After a couple of miles, she swung off the expressway. We went past some tall high-tension towers with connecting cables that looked like staff lines on a sheet of music. We were in the decaying neighborhood near the tracks. “Now I know this is right,” Mother said. “There’s our old sign.”

  The sign was a tall billboard, black and white, that advertised my father’s dance studio. The studio had been closed for years and the building it had been in was gone. The sign showed a man in a tuxedo waltzing with a woman in an evening gown. I was always sure it was a waltz. The dancers were nearly two stories high, and the weather had bleached them into phantoms. The lettering—the name of the studio, my father’s name—had disappeared.

  “They’ve changed everything,” my mother said, peering about. “Can this be the station?”

  We went up a little drive that wound past a cindery lot full of flatbed trucks and that ended up at the smudgy brownstone depot.

  “Is that your Will?” Mother said.

  Will was on the station platform, leaning against a baggage truck. He had a duffel bag between his shoes and a plastic cup of coffee in his mittened hand. He seemed to have put on weight, girlishly, through the hips, and his face looked thicker to me, from temple to temple. His gold-rimmed spectacles looked too small.

  My mother stopped in an empty cab lane, and I got out and call
ed to Will. It wasn’t far from the platform to the car, and Will’s pack wasn’t a large one, but he seemed to be winded when he got to me. I let him kiss me, and then he stepped back and blew a cold breath and drank from the coffee cup, with his eyes on my face.

  Mother was pretending to be busy with something in her handbag, not paying attention to me and Will.

  “I look awful,” I said.

  “No, no, but I probably do,” Will said. “No sleep, and I’m fat. So this is your town?”

  He tossed the coffee cup at an oil drum and glanced around at the cold train yards and low buildings. A brass foundry was throwing a yellowish column of smoke over a line of Canadian Pacific boxcars.

  I said, “The problem is you’re looking at the wrong side of the tracks.”

  A wind whipped Will’s lank hair across his face. “Does your mom smoke?” he said. “I ran out in the middle of the night on the train, and the club car was closed. Eight hours across Pennsylvania without a cigarette.”

  The car horn sounded as my mother climbed from behind the wheel. “That was an accident,” she said, because I was frowning at her. “Hello. Are you Will?” She came around the car and stood on tiptoes and kissed him. “You picked a miserable day to come visit us.”

  She was using her young-girl voice, and I was embarrassed for her. “He needs a cigarette,” I said.

  Will got into the back of the car and I sat beside my mother again. After we started up, Mother said, “Why doesn’t Will stay at my place, in your old room, Belle? I’m all alone there, with plenty of space to kick around in.”

  “We’ll be able to get him a good motel,” I said quickly, before Will could answer. “Let’s try that Ramada, over near the new elementary school.” It was odd, after he had come all the way from Cambridge, but I didn’t want him in my old room, in the house where I had been a child. “I’d put you at my place,” I said, “but there’s mountains of tax stuff all over.”

  “You’ve been busy,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. I sat sidewise, looking at each of them in turn. Will had some blackish spots around his mouth—ballpoint ink, maybe. I wished he had freshened up and put on a better shirt before leaving the train.